Author: nlewkowitz

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Shop Work

It was a rather warm day here in New England on Friday, so we opened up the garage door in the machine shop and enjoyed the outside air. A few students were working on projects in the shop, which always makes us seem busy. Clark was putting on some finishing touches for the traffic light project. Just needed to drill some holes in an acrylic sheet to mount some new electronics which make up the internals of the traffic light. With that done, we gave the light a test in the classroom and it performed perfectly. Will post a video of the clock working next week.

In addition to Clark B working on the traffic light, Lucas C and Daniel R were cutting using our Atlas CNC router. The cuts were for speaker boxes they have been working on for several months. It’s exciting to see these finally come to life, and are representative of many hours of test cuts in cardboard on our laser cutter. Hopefully these speakers will be finished in the next few weeks. A short video of work happening in the machine shop today is below.

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Tetris

The Tetris is finally complete. This has been a project that is several years in the making. In fact, the current seniors were Freshmen when we first build the frame for the project. Obviously, COVID played a role in the delay of the project, but a lot of credit needs to go to Senior Dylan who has spent most of the year rewiring, creating PCBs, and writing a lot of complicated code to get this thing working. We finally moved it to a new resting place in our shop for some ‘testing’ until we get final approval to mount it in the front hallway of the school. Currently, the game can be played with any smart device. Will have a more thorough writeup of the project coming soon. Images and video below.

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Speakers

While I’m still getting over the thrill of having a new Tesla to play with, the shop was focused on getting some CNC Router cuts executed today. Seniors Daniel and Lucas have been designing speaker boxes. The boxes are quite particular, using parameters within Fusion 360 to control volume specific to the different speaker dynamics. I wrote about it more specifically earlier this year in this post.

Today we began the first cuts of the Fusion 360 files. We exported the files from Fusion as DXFs and then imported them into VCarve. We created multiple cutting paths for different heights and types (pockets v profiles) and set the Atlas router to work. Below are a few images of the process. We will have more to show next week.

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Simon

Well, it was delivery day today!

I took delivery of my MY this morning in Peabody, MA. A slight issue arose this morning when driving there I noticed somebody sideswiped my trade-in and left some sort of rubber mark all down the passenger side of the car. Luckily, no denting and I was able to spend about 30 minutes getting the rubber (or whatever it was) off the car. Found part of a side mirror cover near my vehicle.

It was very cold today, so I took a rather quick look around the vehicle when I arrived, and then sat inside and played around with things. The car was unlocked before I accepted delivery, which was nice. It looked beautiful, and everything looked in order. The whole process took about an hour, which included me inspecting the car, them working on my trade-in (took them about 20 mins to get the front plates off of it for some reason), and then waiting for registration. One of the Tesla workers got in the car with me and answered all my questions, then put on my license plate and I drove away. Very easy, just wish the weather was a bit nicer.

Afterwards, Ash and I drove to Marblehead for a quick lunch and then headed back home. We continued to play around with the car features. I spent some more time sitting in the car and setting things up when we got home, but eventually had to stop and join a Zoom meeting. Setup the car to be ready to go at 5:45 am tomorrow, so we will see how that goes.

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OHNC

Most of today was spent being excited for my Tesla delivery day tomorrow and preparing for the OHNC meeting this evening. Tonight was the first time I would host the OHNC meeting as acting president. We had a few items on the agenda, and besides the East Boston PD having some difficulty getting into the meeting, everything else seemed to go smoothly which was nice. We also let our members know that nominations for a new board will happen this summer, so it will be exciting to see who will be taking over for us.

Now I will try and sleep and dream electric dreams.